FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT BLUE VELVET - PAGE 3

Sometimes you catch a break. To writer Barry Gifford, who had written several books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, the break came when he gave a friend the manuscript of a new novel he was working on. The friend was going out of town and needed something to read. He liked the unfinished book and showed it to a friend of his, who loved it. That friend-of-a-friend turned out to be David Lynch, director of "Twin Peaks" and "Blue Velvet," and he bought the movie rights to the book.

People "I put on the most jewelry I own. . . . I sprayed myself with Passion." -anchorwoman Barbara Walters, on standing in for Elizabeth Taylor at the New York premiere of "The Flintstones," which benefitted Taylor's AIDS Foundation. "Once you've made a reputation for being beautiful, and if you have an accent, you have to be the femme fatale. I've been very lucky-I didn't get stuck in that." -actress and model Isabella Rossellini in June New Woman magazine discussing not being pigeonholed in Hollywood after a part in the 1986 movie "Blue Velvet."

"In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings." --writer Delia Ephron, on the difficulty of being a woman in Hollywood "I have gotten an awful lot of press just because I think people are sort of astonished that a homemaker can go out and build an over-a-million-dollar company. But this is not so unusual in America. So instead of talking about how great it is that a woman has gone out and from scratch done something amazing. . .I'm vilified."

Surrounded by as much hype and hoopla as any show I can remember, the premiere of David Lynch's two-hour film "Twin Peaks" next Sunday is one of the most anticipated debuts in television history. Part of the reason for this is the Big Screen medium from which Lynch comes. But mostly it has to do with the big screen baggage he carries. Lynch is the Prince of Middle-American Darkness, hailed by critics as a "genius" and "visionary" for such films as 1978's "Eraserhead," 1980's "The Elephant Man" and even the 1984 film dud "Dune."

The late Mayor Richard J. Daley blew off dinner with the King of Sweden to sing with him. Communist officials got him drunk during a visit to Poland. Film director David Lynch hung out in his Las Vegas dressing room while working on the script for "Blue Velvet." He sold his L.A. mansion to Steven Spielberg and his ranch to Will Smith, packed up and moved to Branson, Mo. Bobby Vinton's romantic ballads may be the definition of easygoing, but they've repeatedly had an impact over the course of the crooner's 40-year career.

When the film "Blue Velvet" hit theaters four years ago, it was clear that director David Lynch was a cinematic visionary. The story of a young man in small-town America who discovers forbidden sexual self-knowledge was hailed as a masterpiece and garnered a best director Oscar nomination for Lynch. Lynch was courted by all the usual Hollywood suspects-he has come close to making more than half a dozen films since "Blue Velvet" elevated him to the "A" directors. But, basically, he has spent the last four years struggling to get a film off the ground.

If the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group had been able to stay in business long enough to release "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," the now-bankrupt distributor could have enjoyed its first mass-market hit. (The DeLaurentiis "successes" "Blue Velvet" and "Crimes of the Heart" barely broke even.) Last year, when DeLaurentiis didn`t have sufficient funds to follow through on the just-wrapped time-travel comedy, the video company Nelson Entertainment came to the rescue, acquiring all domestic rights (DeLaurentiis kept foreign)

Filmmaker Mike van Diem comes rushing to the table in his hotel's restaurant, breathlessly late and toting a mysterious object. In the middle of the table, he plops down a slender, tallish object draped in blue velvet. Underneath is a genuine Oscar, the golden-gleaming statuette that van Diem won last month as director of "Character," this year's Academy Award pick for Best Foreign Film. As he proudly unveils his new toy, he says, with characteristic exuberance, "How's that for a centerpiece?"

Dreams sometimes end where they began. And, if movies can reproduce the dream state more closely than any other art form, David Lynch, the director of "Lost Highway," remains a rare master of full-blooded movie nightmare. Lynch is an artist of dark forces and creepy impulses, an aesthete of sleaze. A poet of nausea, voyeurism and sexual panic. But, though he has suffered from neglect and critical displeasure recently, "Lost Highway" brings Lynch back in his best and darkest vein: that world of awful yet sometimes hilarious horror beneath the surface of the everyday, that he tapped in "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet."